The way I see it is a majority of trophy bass are caught by anglers that know the virtues of Catch & Release and usually practice it. Trust me having a double digit can make your brain turn to mush.

However there are those trophy bass that are caught by non bass anglers on powerbait and what not and kept but for the most part this does not happen on a regular basis so in my opinion should not be that big of a deal on whether they keep them or not.

The third angler is the one who knows how to catch bass regularly and choses to keep them for whatever reason, dinks and trophies. He knows the benefits of catch and release and keeps his fish anyway. He would be more dangerous to a fishery than the angler that accidently catches a trophy bass because he has the knowledge to catch bass and has made the decision to keep his fish. Unfortunately this third angler will be extremely hard to convince start to catch & release because he is more set in his ways.

Most of the lakes in Cali seem to be healthy fisheries, of course there are always exceptions, but I don't think what happened at castaic in the 80's is going to happen again where hundreds of bass anglers from around the nation converged on the lake and kept every trophy bass they caught. Then again I could be wrong

These are just my 2 am ramblings....